In the 1920s in Riceville, Tennessee, a little red-dirt southern town beside the train tracks, my mother played Debussy on piano a decade after he died. He was one of the last composers of classical music whose works would be universally recognized and adored, played by young and old in parlors everywhere. Yet Debussy was also one of the most radical composers who ever lived. His training was grounded in the past, yet in his work he threw much of what he had learned out the window: the melodies, the harmonies, the forms, the attitudes.
Unlike many of the modernists who followed him, Debussy set out not to shock but to intoxicate, not to provoke but to seduce. “I love music passionately,” he said, “and because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art… an open-air art, an art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea!” He was a fierce enemy of abstraction: “There’s no need for music to make people think!… It would be enough if… they felt that for a moment they had been dreaming of an imaginary country.”
Claude-Achille Debussy was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, his father a china salesman and his mother a seamstress. He began studying piano at age seven and by age ten had advanced so remarkably that he was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire. He studied at that notoriously conservative school for eleven years, though he proved a generally recalcitrant and free-spirited student. Stories abound of Debussy shocking his professors by breaking musical rules wholesale. He got away with it because nearly everybody understood his brilliance. Outside school his life was already adventurous. For three summers starting in 1880 he traveled around Europe as pianist for Nadezhda von Meck, the celebrated patroness of Tchaikovsky. At age eighteen he started an affair in Paris with Blanche Vasnier, a married singer, that went on for eight years.
In 1884 Debussy wrote a cantata polite enough to win the Conservatoire’s Prix de Rome, which required a three-year residence in Rome. He found he despised the city, his fellow students, the accommodations, and the food. Dutifully he composed his required residency pieces, which the professors decried as “courting the unusual.” “I am too enamored of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!” he wrote in a letter. After only two years he fled back to Paris and Blanche. There were other women in those days, too; as a young man Debussy was a bohemian of the more profligate variety. One mistress threatened suicide if he left her; another, whom he married in 1899, did shoot herself when he left for a new wife, but she survived. Debussy himself was beset by suicidal thoughts.
In 1890 he wrote what would become his first famous piece, though he only published it (much revised) in 1905: Clair de Lune (Moonlight), for piano. The piece is archetypically Debussy: languid, dreamlike, full of subtle perfumes, in harmony and melody and pianism a work of the most remarkable originality.
Living in the high-bohemian district of Montmartre in Paris, Debussy was caught up in the arts scene of the late-century French fin de siècle, a period when romanticism had become overripe and Western culture was stumbling toward the catastrophes of the next century. Still, the fin de siècle was fertile for the arts all over Europe. Debussy hung out with the Symbolists, writers whose founders and heroes included Edgar Allan Poe and the poets Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. One of the group gave an appropriately opaque summary of their goals: away with “plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description… scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.” (Aha… What?)
Based on a famously nebulous and erotic poem of his friend Mallarmé, in 1891–1894 Debussy wrote what was at once his most famous orchestral work, his first masterpiece, and the inauguration of musical modernism: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). In Mallarmé’s poem a faun from ancient myth lies dreaming of his lovemaking with a nymph. Debussy places his version in a new tonal world: a sighing melody in the lowest range of the flute, whose silken sexiness had never been explored before. The piece unfolds like a waking dream, harmonies drifting and unresolved, melodies like the breathing of wind, rhythms spreading loosely around the barline, the strings and harp like diaphanous veils, the form as free yet inevitable as rock sculpted by flowing water.
The singular, utterly fresh, entirely revolutionary style of Faune sounds so familiar, natural and inevitable that it is easy to miss what a complex and difficult synthesis it was. For Faune, Debussy drew on an enormous range of influences. At the Conservatoire he had been steeped in the mostly Germanic past. For a while he involved himself with Wagner, studying the scores and making a pilgrimage to Bayreuth. Beyond that there was the long history of French music, from the little character pieces for harpsichord of François Couperin to the subtle harmonies of Debussy’s older contemporary Gabriel Fauré. The Russian masters of the time played a part in his influences as well: Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky.
Debussy found even more exotic influences in Paris: the gnomic and harmonically innovative pieces of Erik Satie, one of the grand eccentrics of the day both in his antiromantic music and his person. Among his titles: Pieces to Make You Run Away, Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a dog). And there was the enchanted exoticism of the Javanese gamelan Debussy encountered at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, a languid and exotic music that seemed to wipe away everything he had been taught. Perhaps that music ringing with gongs completed his break from the past, from classical forms and its attendant rules and regulations. Now he largely put Beethoven aside; Wagner became for him “that old poisoner… a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.” By a creative alchemy of singular genius Debussy forged this mélange of influences into a musical personality that seemed to have come out of nowhere fully formed.
Because of his tendency to compose pieces portraying wind and water and people and events, critics labeled him an impressionist, after the contemporary French painters who worked outdoors and attempted to capture the elements on canvas. Debussy hated the label but it stuck, and soon the younger Ravel joined him as the other founding father of musical impressionism.
Despite Debussy’s distaste for it, “impressionism” is as good a label as any for him, as shown in his next great orchestral work, La mer, (The Sea) from 1903–1905. It amounts to a three-movement symphony, but is something far from the usual—meaning Germanic—idea of what constituted a symphony. It is a series of portraits of the sea in motion. “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea” gradually lays out a broad expanse, then sails into a journey. Part of the effect of the piece is Debussy’s unprecedented use of the strings. They shape changing colors and textures, supplying an atmosphere over which winds and brass sing rhapsodic melodies. “Play of the Waves” is a more lively movement of shifting, shimmering sonorities. “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea” begins with a squall, then gradually transforms toward a soaring, rapturous finish.
Debussy’s ability to paint the world with music was incomparable, but like the Symbolists he was not interested in mere portrayal—he aimed for something more spiritual and poetic. It did not trouble him that he had actually never sailed on the sea; the sea in his imagination was more important. Meanwhile, though he had spent exactly one day in Spain, he wrote a remarkable work inspired by that country, the three-movement Ibéria for orchestra. (Likewise his contemporary Edgar Degas painted dance classes for years without ever having seen one.) The first of Ibéria’s three movements, all of them based on dance, begins with an explosion of castanets; the finale turns the string section into a kind of superguitar.
In his piano music Debussy remade the instrument in the same way and same spirit as Chopin had: new figures, new colors, new kinds of singing on an instrument that inherently resists singing. For a start, take in the Preludes, Book 1. Each of its miniatures is named: “Dancers of Delphi,” “Puck’s Dances,” the American-tinged “Minstrels.” Perhaps the centerpiece is “The Sunken Cathedral,” based on the old myth of a cathedral sunk in the sea that daily rises to the surface with bells ringing, organ playing, priests chanting. Accordingly, the piece swells gradually to an immense climax, its grand effect based on a novel technique: the middle pedal of the piano sustains bass notes while pealing chords sound above, creating piano resonances no one had explored before.
Finally, try Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on a Symbolist play with a medieval setting by Maurice Maeterlinck. Prince Golaud stumbles on the weeping Mélisande in a forest, her crown fallen in a spring. We never find out who she is or where she came from. She returns to his castle with him; they marry. She spends much of her time with his young and ingenuous half brother Pelléas, arousing Golaud’s suspicions. Finally in a transport of jealousy he cuts both of them down. Debussy shaped this vaporous tale into tableaus from myth and dream. The premiere was done behind a transparent curtain. He once said that there was too much singing in opera, so he invented a unique kind of musical declamation for the singers that only occasionally flowers into lyricism. One critic called Pelléas “musical hashish”; it became a cult sensation among the young aesthetes of Paris. Pelléas is a work so otherworldly, so inimical to opera’s usual dramatic and sentimental rigmaroles, so gothically Anne Rice–meets–David Lynch, that the ideal production would be mounted by a cast of masochists for an audience of vampires.
Debussy’s last years were miserable. Through a long decline from cancer he kept composing as best he could. He died in Paris in March 1918, his passing hardly noticed in the flood of death from the war.
Among the great classical composers Debussy may have been the one least cooked by rules and formulas. The result was a new art, one of ambiance and evocation and mystery. At the same time he was among the most fastidious of craftsmen, with the patience, skill, and genius to realize new kinds of creative ambition, which he pursued with moral fervor. “I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naïve candor of a child,” Debussy said. “It is bound to offend the partisans of deceit and artifice. I foresee that and rejoice at it.”
More Debussy: Nocturnes for orchestra; Estampes for piano; the sonatas for violin and cello.